I dunno, I don't think "lots of layers" translates to 1337 DIGITAL PAINTING SKILLZ, it's just one way to do it that works for me. xD Some people do their digital artwork all on one layer and that can be even more impressive! It's a medium, like any other -- it takes practice to get good at and there's a bunch of different ways to use it, but you don't necessarily HAVE to be good at it. You get good at whatever works best for you. :")

I suppose I didn't quite word it well enough, but what I meant was something more like "just having one layer is way complicated for my simple caveman brain so a ton of layers (like an "underpainting") makes you seem like a super genius. XD I'm quite easy to impress annnd I'm also quite stupid, to be brutally honest.

My guess: not only can Xira read people's in-the-moment thoughts, he also is able to read people's MEMORIES, which is what he's doing here. The office (library?) is merely how a mind is visually represented in this universe/for Xira. The books on the desk are the memories currently being used, and the open book ("Necromancer of Rusanne", if I'm seeing that correctly) is the memory that Mr. Scared Healer is actively focusing on. /shrug/ What this page seems like to me.

Also, I love the way this page is done! Like Wabbajack said, old photograph. Very nice.

And Xira is awesome. Awesome because of his abilities and also because of where he keeps his runes. It's so simple and easy to reach and yet how many people would think to look on the inside of his gauntlets?

Holy COW this PAGE and this VOTE INCENTIVE! The page is brilliant; I LOVE the visual effect you achieved, it really fits with what's going on, and I think it's quite brilliant. Dude, so Xira can reach into the dude's mind and access entire BOOKS he's read? That is SO HANDY. (Either that or it's Why?!?!'s, which also makes a lot of sense. In fact, now that I look at the titles on the books, that IS what's going on, isn't it? Which is even MORE handy because you don't have to delve through the dude's entire memory. XD)

I didn't catch at first that he was touching his own arm and not the guy's, but that's because I rush out of interest. Pretty great that he's able to do that without the guy necessarily noticing. Xira would make a pretty boss detective Iamjustsayin'.

And the vote incentive is brilliant, because I have often wondered what goes into these amazingly-detailed comics people like you do. So your underpainting is shades of yellow? I've usually done that with grays, I never thought of this! Hope you don't mind if I borrow that sheet as a color ref so I can try it! And I never realized people use texture pallets to give the whole page texture. BRILLIANT! I feel so inspired right now. =D Thanks for that breakdown, Shazzbaa!

Gosh gosh gosh thank you so much!! I'm super happy with how it came out! *u*

And ahhhh I'm so glad the process shots gave you ideas!
For me, my underpainting is different colours depending on the lighting of the scene! :"D Some nighttime scenes have had shades of blue or purple, the scene of Sev landing at the beginning of the chapter had a mostly pink underpainting, whereas most of the scenes in dhemin have had yellow and orange to reflect the afternoon sun getting lower, and many of the Agorath Order scenes are weird colours like green or bright red to make the Order's lighting seem off.
Since I shade on top of the underpainting, I use the it primarily to set the colour of the lighting of the scene, to make all the colours fit together, rather than using that as the main source of rendering. :")

AND TEXTURES ARE SO GREAT. They feel like cheating!! I think you can't get carried away and abuse them but they make a great extra subtle touch, and for me it dilutes a little of the smoothness that digital colouring tends to have, which I like. :")

HOw does it work exactly? I see that the underpainting and the shading are listed as two separate steps; could you tell me a little more about how you apply them differently? I'd sure appreciate the advice! ^^

The thing is that colouring is very difficult for me, and I'm also very slow at choosing colours, so I have a lot of tricks in my process that speed that up for me! IT SEEMS LIKE A LOT OF EXTRA STEPS but ultimately it gives me a better page faster because the process of doing it right in one step would take me a lot of time. (There are definitely better ways to approach colouring if you want to get good at it.)

The first thing I do is a layer of flat colours, that is just straight up WHAT COLOUR THAT THING IS. The sky is blue, apples are red, grass is green. As I've referenced before, I use a specific set of swatches to colour my characters, which is actually not a great way to go because things usually are different colours under different lighting.
My way around this is what I refer to as my underpainting -- just the basic colour of the light and the atmosphere that I put on a layer underneath my layer of flat colours. I make the flats just a little bit transparent (like 75% or so) so that the underpainting shows through, and it makes all the flat colours less garish -- they're now affected by the lighting of the scene.
This isn't a great way to get contrast, though, so I have a shading layer on TOP of that. I fill that layer with white and shade with a colour that seems to make sense (in real life, shadows tend to be blue or purple under yellow light, but different lighting will change that), and set the whole layer as a "multiply" layer (which in effect blends with the underlying colour but makes it a darker).
If you'd like to actually watch me doing this, I have recorded part of the process and explain what I'm doing about 5 minutes or so in, but my livestreams tend to be, um, long, so I don't know if that's a desirable method. xD

Nice style.
I was thinking for a moment "Wait, he is speaking out loud his runeword right next to Tari. Wouldn't she hea... oh, right" Silly me.

First I thought Xira used his mind reading to get inside the Healer's office, using his visual memory of the place. But then again it would be strange for him to have a book on Jonan. Or not?
So I think he is just "simply" and quite literally (no pun intended, but I'm not gonna complain) reading his mind. And as for that, I think the appearence of it would depend on both the caster's imagination and the subject's way of thinking. So who knows, but I highly doubt reading Sev's mind would bring up an office, just saying 8)

Come on, Sev can't even read. I highly doubt his memories would be books. I am imagining something along the lines of a wacky Alice in Wonderland thing, with octopus squirrels hopping about, dragons trying to talk to you in sign language and rosebuds singing the ABC song.

Yeah, but this is Xira's interpretation, and he can read. I feel like maybe Severian's thoughts would be written in crayon on the side of a wall. Sev's not stupid though, so it wouldn't just be a few words like "ooh shiny things!"; no, it'd be like trying to read Mrs. Dalloway or something stream-of-conciousness on the side of a wall.

I'm leaning towards Tehbeefer's theory. This is also how Xira sees minds, and that has to influence it somehow. I like the crayon on the wall idea for Sev.

All this makes me wonder what the other characters' minds would look like. Tareth's would be cozy private library with big squishy armchairs, I think. Jonan's would probably be similar to Mr. Healer's, but more. . . hazardous? Or maybe darker lighting?

The crayon and arches idea is actually really fitting. Maybe, instead of books, packs of sticky notes or something? You know, a whole bunch of them stacked not-quite-evenly on top of each other for one set of memories? With random notes drawn off to the side of them graphic-organizer style? (I mean obviously they wouldn't be sticky notes but we have the photo-video memory things here though so...

Esra's would be painfully organized and neat... except that doesn't feel QUITE right. I don't know, but he doesn't seem serene enough for his thoughts to be as organized as he tries to make the world. Maybe rank and file neatness, but with stray, stubborn pages that stick out of books here and there to throw things off-kilter? Or a few shelves that have broken their moorings on one side and aren't even anymore?

Question time! How long does it take you to lay out those perspective maps in photoshop? They look rather useful but I've always wondered just how long they take to make, I guess you find them worth the time however regardless of how long they take.

Not too long, honestly! Maybe an hour at most? Depending on how many panels I do a grid for -- I don't do them unless there's enough perspective in the shot that I think it'll look off if I wing it, haha.

I reallllly need to sit down at some point and take the time to make a tutorial/guide for how I do those; it's not difficult at all, just a little tedious. But since I have a lot of scenes that take place with BUILDINGS for some reason they're reaaaaaallly helpful to keep stuff from looking weird or crooked, and much easier for me than breaking out the t-square. *u*

I also thought he was just infiltrating the hospital on my first pass of the page. I thought it was pretty swell Jonan already ranks his own book. Then I realized that yes...this probably is just how this individual's thoughts are laid out when Xira peeks in on them. Thought-provoking webcomics are the best webcomics :D

Hmm... I'm going to go out on a limb here. I think Xira might be delving into hospital dude's mind and is actually seeing his office. I see medical books on that desk, as well as what looks slightly like a note-to-self on the edge. So far, seems like what any good doctor would have on his desk. But right in the centre is the Necromancer of Rusanne, opened like it was being read only moments ago.

I'm guessing this either means Xira's seeing what hospital dude was doing before they knocked, like looking at a recent memory. This is just my weak theory so far, since we've only seen one page of this, ehehe...

This is what I was thinking, but then again, why would he have a whole book, on Jonan in hard cover and title it "The Necromancer of Rusanne". Who would write a book on him, while he was still alive, actually fairly young and apparently not the guy you want to cross - and I highly doubt that Jonan would appreciate any books being written on him.
On the other hand a more convincing argument is the other book "Medical Knowledge". Wouldn't that be the weirdest title? Why not just "Medicine" or "Medical Arts" if you really got the fancies? Knowledge is something you store in your head.
Just guessing though... We will have to wait. Hopefully the next page is not a cut away :D

Thanks! :"D And nooooo I don't usually time myself -- not like.... reliably, anyway, haha. I did most of the actual colouring on my train ride home, which was about 9 hours long, but I wasn't colouring the entire time so THAT'S NOT QUITE IT, but something close to that! Worth noting as far as "time spent on this page" that my first pass of the underpainting didn't come out like I wanted (it was originally brighter), so I ended up redoing it -- there was a lot of experimentation that went into trying to get this atmosphere to look right. :")

Ok, if the books/papers are memories, then the shadowy figures might be. . . emotions? Each figure is a different feeling? I'm thinking of an episode of the show Teen Titans (the older one, not the remake): Cyborg and Beast Boy accidentally get sucked into Raven's mind and all the different aspects of her personality (peppy, badass fighter, depressed, etc.)appear as Raven in different outfits.

They could also simply represent memories of people...? Eeeh, but we have the Jonan book... Hmmm, maybe they represent his consciousness? And if they catch Xira, he will be thrown out of the memory? Wild guessing all around.

Why is everyone else interpreting this as him reading through a guy's memories or literally rifling through his thoughts?

I figured he just did the Professor Xavier / Rolo Lamperouge / Dominique the Cyclops thing and just "paused" the minds of everyone in the area, putting them into temporary suspended animation... allowing him to snoop around actual books in the actual room beyond.